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Choose what starts a workflow

A workflow starts on a record change, on a schedule, on a date you choose, or when you run it yourself.

1 min read · Published Jul 4, 2026

A trigger is the event that starts a workflow. Tormano offers these.

When a record changes

  • Record created: a contact, company, deal, donation, grant, volunteer, event, or activity is created.
  • Record updated: any field on the record changes.
  • Field changed: one particular field changes, such as lifecycle becoming Donor.
  • Stage changed: a pipeline stage changes.
  • Form submitted: a web form or donation form is submitted.

On a schedule or a date

  • Scheduled: runs on a repeating schedule you choose, such as every day at 9am in your organization’s time zone. Good for fiscal-year resets and recurring summaries.
  • Date-based: runs relative to a date on the record, such as 30 days after a contact’s last activity, or 7 days before a grant deadline.

Other triggers

  • Email event: someone opens or clicks one of your emails.
  • Manual: you run the workflow on a record yourself.

Deleting a record does not start a workflow.

One trigger per workflow

Each workflow has exactly one trigger. To act on more than one event, build more than one workflow.

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